Dr. Mac: The word on several thousand pictures

DR. MACHow to handle 6,000 vacation pictures

Published 5:30 am, Wednesday, August 17, 2011

I took more than 6,000 photos on my summer vacation. I know that sounds like a lot, and it is, but I wanted great pictures, and I was determined to get them.

So, when something interesting caught my eye, I would snap off some wide shots (snap, snap, snap), then shoot a few at different zoom levels (snap, snap, snap). I might change the aperture (snap, snap) or shutter speed (snap, snap), or select a different focal point (snap, snap, snap).

That's the great thing about digital. Shooting a hundred pictures costs the same as shooting one. No film, processing or waiting. You've got to love that, and I do, since I believe a great shot can happen to anyone. That's why I shoot everything more than once. I throw away a lot of shots, but I usually find one or more that please me.

So that's my first tip: The more you shoot, the more likely you'll shoot a winner.

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I wanted the best quality possible, so I shot in the Canon Camera RAW file format, which offers the highest resolution and flexibility in editing. The downside is that each Camera RAW file is roughly 25MB in size, which means I chew up around one gigabyte of storage for every 40 pictures I take. Needless to say, it doesn't take me long to fill an 8GB SD card.

Then there's the issue of backing up your pictures. By the end of our trip I had over 100GB of photos on my MacBook Pro. Since I had to erase my SD cards to reuse them, I wanted to make sure I had a backup. I brought along an external 500GB FireWire 800 hard drive and used Mac OS X Time Machine to back up all of my files.

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Finally, I connected my MacBook Pro to the 42-inch flat-screen TV in our room each night (via HDMI) to review each day's pictures with my wife on the big screen. So my final tip: The Moshi Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter ($35; http://store.moshimonde.com) is a winner.

Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus is a leading authority on Mac OS X, the author of 60 books, includingiPad for Dummies, Mac OS X Lion for DummiesandIncredible iPhone Apps for Dummies,and a Mac consultant, troubleshooter and trainer. Visit his website at www.boblevitus.com; email comments to doc@boblevitus.com.